Carving blocks of stone , building roads
etc isn't rocket science
Why the hell would you go around carving blocks of stone and build roads when you're out hunting happily?
It's not a question if they had the brains to do it, we haven't changed much since then, it is a question of whether they had any interest in doing it. They may not have had that.
and if some race had built
a city 100,000 years ago VERY little of it would
still be around today (Ice Ages notwithstanding).
Look at how little is left of most Roman ruins and
they're only 2000 years old!
What? You need to do a lot more travelling! There are so many roman ruins around, you wouldn't believe it! Yeah, I've done a lot of travelling, and I've seen tons of them. If you had seen Pompeii, there is no way you would have made such a statement, because that city might well have been preserved for another 98000 years.
Ever heard of fossils? There are many excellently preserved fossils on record that are many millions of years old.
If, for some reason, our civilization had died out, it is very likely that there would be tons of stuff left after us to be found in 100 000 years.
That being said, I'm as excited by lost cities as anybody.
Yeah, I had a funny incident where my address was put in the From:-field of a pr0n-spam sent using a formmail exploit. I quickly made an autoresponder to the people who complained to me, but it turned out to be just a handful of people (who I then took the opportunity of educating about many things).
But there are later versions of formmail that are patched, aren't there?
Re:more important things to do in space ...
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 2
hole in the sky (ozone layer),
That's about to get solved.
running out of coal,
Dunno about that one. Perhaps you would. There are some resources we might run out of, yes.
AIDS.
"Can you imagine something like tuberculosis, only worse?" You would understand very well what it was about.
You know, there are things that may be done with this planet, so that we won't have to leave in the nearest future.
Well, many people have some choices made for them, for example, I'm stuck with RH.
Not that I would want Mandrake anyway, it couldn't identify my video card correctly.
I just tried to install KDE on RH 7.1 and descended pretty quickly into dependency hell.
This is really, really bad. I bet I broke many things in the attempt, and I really have no clue what I broke.
Yes, it is a valid argument that you should wait for your distro makers, but often, that is not an option.
For example, there are lots of scientific software that never make it into a distro, and making it easy to install stuff that isn't in the distro is very, very important. If distro makers think that they can always tell their customers to wait untill they get a new release out, they will fail.
And my current experience with KDE3 makes me think that RH has a very long way to go. But that doesn't necesssarily mean that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. It is ready for me, anyway.
Re:more important things to do in space ...
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
On the contrary, my friend, on the contrary!
If you lived 150 years ago, what would your idea of "communication technology" be like?
Without Planck trying to understand blackbodies, Quantum Mechanics might never have had the kick it needed, to get Bohr's ponderings into the structure of atoms. In 1900, most problems seemed nearly solved, except for two little "clouds on physics' sky" as noted by Kelvin. It turned out that these two clouds would lead to QM and relativity. And they had quite a lot to do with observations done in astronomy.
Without these ideas, there would be no
semiconductors, there would be no computers. You wouldn't be posting to/. if it hadn't been for those looking into the most fundamental questions of their time.
Quarks, quark-gluon plasma are among the most fundamental questions of our time.
What would a manned mission to Mars give us?
Well, some kewl tech, quite a lot of resources into research, and probably also a positive long-term effect following from the increased attention given to science.
But it is not likely to be of fundamental importance to our world-view. It is not likely to do anything to give us understanding that is going to be used in that kind of technology you can't even imagine today.
Make sure your/etc/apt/sources.list is accurate and up to date.
That's all well and fine, but what if somebody is able to put malicious code on the real servers, in the binaries we download in a man-in-the-middle-attack, then we would all be in deep trouble.
I always check the signatures of software I download, but it doesn't mean anything other than that somebody signed it.
We need to contract the PGP web of trust, folks, so that there are few hops between users and and those who sign the software we use, so that we can really check if the signature belongs to a person we trust.
I'm in Oslo, Norway, I'd love to exchange signatures with anybody I can meet face to face, so if somebody happens to be close, drop me a note.
Hehe, I can't see any reason for that. But since there are going to be lots of big releases that are not going into woody, (KDE3.0, Apache2.0 (allready out), Openoffice 1.0, Mozilla 1.0, GNOME 2.0, to name a few), it strikes me as odd that they didn't call this 2.3. Besides, what happened to Linux 2.4, they still think that it isn't mature enough to be installed as default...?
One argument is of course that the size of the distro has about doubled since 2.2, but I'm kind of curious about the version numbering nevertheless.
That being said, Debian is my favorite distro, and woody's going into my machine regardless of version numbers.
WebDAV seems great when you try to work with larger groups. While I do OK with FTP and similar stuff, I think it would be a nice feature to be able to mount a remote WebDAV directory, and it seems like this is available in the form of Kiwi Filesystem
Does anybody have any experience with this software? Has it been included in any distros?
Anybody know about any good books covering Apache 2?
I found one book last time I went to the bookshop, but all it contained was listings of various config files... It certainly wasn't a lot the author made on her own in there...
Most people would be inclined to say "oh, fuck them both".
Raises hand. Well, I'm a cosmologist, so obviously, the solar system is a bit too down-to-earth from my perspective.
There is so much research we can do without putting people up there. The costs of having people in orbit is just enormous. OK, there are some things that it is convenient to have people for, and obviously, when you are researching the effects of e.g. microgravity on people, you need people up there.
But, I feel, that most of the manned spaceflight stuff is more for prestige than for science, and while it would be cool to do a few orbits, the last thing we need up there is more junk.
So, I think one should think hard and well before making a lot of manned flights.
That being said, if humanity could gather around the common goal of going to Mars rather than running around killing each other, then, go for it!
You make it sound like TeX is something rarely used...? In the physical sciences, you're not going anywhere without... That is, most use the LaTeX macros. I used it in my thesis, and my uncle, who is a professional typographer, said that very few professional typographers of today would produce something of the same typographical quality.
Because the user has access to the source code, it's possible for him to make the modifications himself. In fact, the GPL encourages this. So chances are, he won't pay someone else to do it.
Or chances are, he doesn't care to do it himself, so he will pay somebody else to do it! Look, there are very few coders out there, most people would rather pay somebody else to do it than do it themselves. I can do some coding, but a lot of work is something I would like to pay somebody to do.
Only large corporations will be interested in this, and only if the corporation has an insufficient internal IT staff to do the job itself.
Where have you been? Outsourcing is the Cool Idea of the Year in the Business world. Outsourcing is hot. Many corporations don't want a internal IT staff (at least not a big one), and they certainly don't want a bunch of hackers sitting around. They just want to focus on their business, and everything that isn't their business they outsource or buy from somebody else. OK, there are many different models out there, but this is certainly not as simple as that. However, some clued managers appreciate the fact that with free software, you can take things in-house if all else fails.
The end-user will only pay for help using the program if he can't figure it out himself. However, the easier the software is to use, the less help the user will need. That's what the term "ease-of-use" is all about.
Well, you can't drive a car without training, and if you don't know how to use a chainsaw without a good chance you will not be hurting yourself and others, you shouldn't use it.
OK, there are software systems that are very simple, and that you can go on using without any knowledge whatsoever.
But then, there are many tasks that you need some brains to accomplish. While "ease-of-use" today means that it should be easy to a beginner, what it should mean is that it would be easy for an experienced operator to do powerful things, and then, trainers should focus on how to teach people to become power users in the shortest possible time.
So, there are a lot of money to be made in this anyway.
Re:Why I will never buy any GXP drive
on
IBM 120GXP Revisited
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
All these articles that rave about millions of systems being vulnerable seem to forget the fact that nobody has been affected.
How do you know that? Black-hats may have known about this for ages and exploiting it silently. Do not confuse lack of reports with lack of attacks.
OK, since free software users have more a sense of community and being publically acknowledged for having found the hole is a big ego-booster, it is less likely to happen around here, but I wouldn't count on it for security.
Yeah, I agree with the points that are made here: An industry that thinks its business model should be unchanged during a technological revolution is just pathetic. One remark, though:
The question I have, is who has more lobbyists? The hardware or media industires?
Well, the hardware industry is quite a lot bigger, isn't it?
However, this means that we need to be very careful about how we talk to people about this. Right now, we can say "look at how these huge record companies are screwing artists and consumers alike!" And there is a lot of truth to it. However, getting the largish hardware industry on the matter means that RIAA, MPAA and the like can say "look at how the huge hardware manufacturers are screwing the poor, idealistic artists for their own profit!" You know, we should be concerned that there may become so truth to that as well, in which case the tables are turned.
Well, if you know Da Vinci, well, we probably only saw a tiny fraction of his genious. He always complained how rulers only wanted him to make bigger and better war machines, to Leonardo a utterly boring and much to easy task, they wanted him to make pretty paintings, also not something for his great genious, though he performed very well at it.
Leonardo wanted to learn how nature worked, and he wanted to learn how to fly. It was a great loss for humanity that Leonardo was unable to dedicate all his time to that.
Hm, well, you know, the thing is that DRMs is used to enforce scarcity, and that's what I dislike about it.
I mean, we have a situation where it is possible to make copies, one as perfect as the first, no degradation of quality, for almost no cost at all.
How can this be negative? I mean, it should be the best thing since sliced bread! It is absolutely astonishing that technology has progressed this far, it was unthinkable just a few years ago.
This fact that there is no scarcity makes it possible to share everything at no cost. For the first time in history can we share everything we make with everyone.
Ok, so what's the problem? The problem is that people can't envision a viable business model in this kind of society. Especially not the suits. Without a business model, how do you make sure that the creative people can go on being creative?
Ok, so this is the problem. However, enforcing scarcity is just a Wrong Solution[tm]. It is means destroying the most fundamental technological advance that the world has seen in a very long time. You shouldn't do that.
Slashdot Mirror
Why the hell would you go around carving blocks of stone and build roads when you're out hunting happily?
It's not a question if they had the brains to do it, we haven't changed much since then, it is a question of whether they had any interest in doing it. They may not have had that.
What? You need to do a lot more travelling! There are so many roman ruins around, you wouldn't believe it! Yeah, I've done a lot of travelling, and I've seen tons of them. If you had seen Pompeii, there is no way you would have made such a statement, because that city might well have been preserved for another 98000 years.
Ever heard of fossils? There are many excellently preserved fossils on record that are many millions of years old.
If, for some reason, our civilization had died out, it is very likely that there would be tons of stuff left after us to be found in 100 000 years.
That being said, I'm as excited by lost cities as anybody.
But there are later versions of formmail that are patched, aren't there?
That's about to get solved.
Dunno about that one. Perhaps you would. There are some resources we might run out of, yes.
"Can you imagine something like tuberculosis, only worse?" You would understand very well what it was about.
You know, there are things that may be done with this planet, so that we won't have to leave in the nearest future.
sticker on their web sites 'privacy protected by EU data protection laws'
That's actually a great idea, I'll keep that in mind! :-)
I just wondered if anybody knows more about what it came to with Abit's allegded GPL violations. And their Gentus Linux is dead isn't it?
I just tried to install KDE on RH 7.1 and descended pretty quickly into dependency hell. This is really, really bad. I bet I broke many things in the attempt, and I really have no clue what I broke.
Yes, it is a valid argument that you should wait for your distro makers, but often, that is not an option.
For example, there are lots of scientific software that never make it into a distro, and making it easy to install stuff that isn't in the distro is very, very important. If distro makers think that they can always tell their customers to wait untill they get a new release out, they will fail.
And my current experience with KDE3 makes me think that RH has a very long way to go. But that doesn't necesssarily mean that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. It is ready for me, anyway.
If you lived 150 years ago, what would your idea of "communication technology" be like?
Without Planck trying to understand blackbodies, Quantum Mechanics might never have had the kick it needed, to get Bohr's ponderings into the structure of atoms. In 1900, most problems seemed nearly solved, except for two little "clouds on physics' sky" as noted by Kelvin. It turned out that these two clouds would lead to QM and relativity. And they had quite a lot to do with observations done in astronomy.
Without these ideas, there would be no semiconductors, there would be no computers. You wouldn't be posting to /. if it hadn't been for those looking into the most fundamental questions of their time.
Quarks, quark-gluon plasma are among the most fundamental questions of our time.
What would a manned mission to Mars give us? Well, some kewl tech, quite a lot of resources into research, and probably also a positive long-term effect following from the increased attention given to science.
But it is not likely to be of fundamental importance to our world-view. It is not likely to do anything to give us understanding that is going to be used in that kind of technology you can't even imagine today.
Thanks! Unfortunately, I can't wait, since for the next 20 days, somebody's paying my tech book bills... :-)
Before that, I used a serious mix of Potato and Progeny + some XFree86-stuff I had to compile myself. I had some trouble, but it solved it.
Once I'm getting my own place, woody's going onto the machine.
That's all well and fine, but what if somebody is able to put malicious code on the real servers, in the binaries we download in a man-in-the-middle-attack, then we would all be in deep trouble.
I always check the signatures of software I download, but it doesn't mean anything other than that somebody signed it.
We need to contract the PGP web of trust, folks, so that there are few hops between users and and those who sign the software we use, so that we can really check if the signature belongs to a person we trust.
I'm in Oslo, Norway, I'd love to exchange signatures with anybody I can meet face to face, so if somebody happens to be close, drop me a note.
One argument is of course that the size of the distro has about doubled since 2.2, but I'm kind of curious about the version numbering nevertheless.
That being said, Debian is my favorite distro, and woody's going into my machine regardless of version numbers.
WebDAV seems great when you try to work with larger groups. While I do OK with FTP and similar stuff, I think it would be a nice feature to be able to mount a remote WebDAV directory, and it seems like this is available in the form of Kiwi Filesystem
Does anybody have any experience with this software? Has it been included in any distros?
I found one book last time I went to the bookshop, but all it contained was listings of various config files... It certainly wasn't a lot the author made on her own in there...
Hehe, cool, but I mean, Mars and Earth are awfully far away from each other at times....?
Raises hand. Well, I'm a cosmologist, so obviously, the solar system is a bit too down-to-earth from my perspective.
There is so much research we can do without putting people up there. The costs of having people in orbit is just enormous. OK, there are some things that it is convenient to have people for, and obviously, when you are researching the effects of e.g. microgravity on people, you need people up there.
But, I feel, that most of the manned spaceflight stuff is more for prestige than for science, and while it would be cool to do a few orbits, the last thing we need up there is more junk.
So, I think one should think hard and well before making a lot of manned flights.
That being said, if humanity could gather around the common goal of going to Mars rather than running around killing each other, then, go for it!
You make it sound like TeX is something rarely used...? In the physical sciences, you're not going anywhere without... That is, most use the LaTeX macros. I used it in my thesis, and my uncle, who is a professional typographer, said that very few professional typographers of today would produce something of the same typographical quality.
Or chances are, he doesn't care to do it himself, so he will pay somebody else to do it! Look, there are very few coders out there, most people would rather pay somebody else to do it than do it themselves. I can do some coding, but a lot of work is something I would like to pay somebody to do.
Where have you been? Outsourcing is the Cool Idea of the Year in the Business world. Outsourcing is hot. Many corporations don't want a internal IT staff (at least not a big one), and they certainly don't want a bunch of hackers sitting around. They just want to focus on their business, and everything that isn't their business they outsource or buy from somebody else. OK, there are many different models out there, but this is certainly not as simple as that. However, some clued managers appreciate the fact that with free software, you can take things in-house if all else fails.
Well, you can't drive a car without training, and if you don't know how to use a chainsaw without a good chance you will not be hurting yourself and others, you shouldn't use it.
OK, there are software systems that are very simple, and that you can go on using without any knowledge whatsoever.
But then, there are many tasks that you need some brains to accomplish. While "ease-of-use" today means that it should be easy to a beginner, what it should mean is that it would be easy for an experienced operator to do powerful things, and then, trainers should focus on how to teach people to become power users in the shortest possible time.
So, there are a lot of money to be made in this anyway.
Scary stuff. Very scary.
How do you know that? Black-hats may have known about this for ages and exploiting it silently. Do not confuse lack of reports with lack of attacks.
OK, since free software users have more a sense of community and being publically acknowledged for having found the hole is a big ego-booster, it is less likely to happen around here, but I wouldn't count on it for security.
Well, the hardware industry is quite a lot bigger, isn't it?
However, this means that we need to be very careful about how we talk to people about this. Right now, we can say "look at how these huge record companies are screwing artists and consumers alike!" And there is a lot of truth to it. However, getting the largish hardware industry on the matter means that RIAA, MPAA and the like can say "look at how the huge hardware manufacturers are screwing the poor, idealistic artists for their own profit!" You know, we should be concerned that there may become so truth to that as well, in which case the tables are turned.
But it is a hell of an experiment to perform...
Leonardo wanted to learn how nature worked, and he wanted to learn how to fly. It was a great loss for humanity that Leonardo was unable to dedicate all his time to that.
Hehe, no. When a similar tax was proposed in Norway, it was delayed because EU wanted a uniform policy on all media....
I mean, we have a situation where it is possible to make copies, one as perfect as the first, no degradation of quality, for almost no cost at all.
How can this be negative? I mean, it should be the best thing since sliced bread! It is absolutely astonishing that technology has progressed this far, it was unthinkable just a few years ago.
This fact that there is no scarcity makes it possible to share everything at no cost. For the first time in history can we share everything we make with everyone.
Ok, so what's the problem? The problem is that people can't envision a viable business model in this kind of society. Especially not the suits. Without a business model, how do you make sure that the creative people can go on being creative?
Ok, so this is the problem. However, enforcing scarcity is just a Wrong Solution[tm]. It is means destroying the most fundamental technological advance that the world has seen in a very long time. You shouldn't do that.
My mother wants a laptop, and I think one of these will be the choice.
However, I want built-in Bluetooth support, and a Crusoe and DDR RAM would be nice too.